Larry the Bartender stood in filtered autumn afternoon light and with his bar towel polished waterspots off the glasses. He wore a vest and a red, long-ended western bow tie, evocative of the Old West saloonkeeper he sometimes imagined himself the echo of. Though his family could draw their lineage in this land all the way back to the Spanish land grants, Older than Old West, this here was decidedly a New West, where the Indians and their Pueblo-influenced casinos were the richest people around, where the descendants of conquistadors and brave colonials now shot heroin or died in rollover crashes on the way home from the bar. Two of Larry's customers had died that way, and Larry thanks God that they took only themselves and their battered pickups with them. The roadside crosses their families had erected felt more obligatory than sorrowful, as though the families had purchased the crosses long before, in anticipation. Drunk-driving deaths around here being so common, perhaps they had.
Larry measured himself against the values of his abuelita, who at 83 still strung her own ristras and made by hand, in the manner she was taught by her own grandmother, the tortillas she served with every meal. Though she had eventually come to a moral detente with the existence of the grand, fluorescent-lit Safeway, she still vocally derided the shelves of prepackaged tortillas as "Further proof that the gringos are trying to ruin us." Larry bit his tongue--the owner of the dominant purveyor of tortillas in the state was every bit as Hispanic as Larry and his abuelita. But his heart swelled with pride when his seven-year-old little girl, Teresa, came home after spending a day learning the art of tortilla-making from her great-grandmother and expressed her great-grandmother's own disdain for machine-made tortillas: "Like Wonder Bread, but in circles." Three days later, Larry's wife reported to him that Teresa had, while coloring in her book, asked what Wonder Bread actually was.